I’ll be listening for competitive messaging versus the up-and-coming cloud alternatives. God knows AWS is facing a barrage of ads by IBM eager to tout that it gets cloud big time. Last week, IBM announced a big campaign — with talking points including the $1 billion in cloud revenue it says reaped in the third quarter alone (IBM’s definition of cloud revenue is being questioned by the SEC). All of this is meant to show that despite losing the $600 million CIA cloud account to AWS, IBM is in this game to stay. An IBM spokesman listed several federal government clients that IBM has for its cloud. IBM bought SoftLayer earlier this year in large part to address the AWS threat and is now moving SmartCloud Enterprise customers over to SoftLayer.

Because it was so early to market, AWS has been able to define it thus far. But now as other public and private clouds, many incorporating OpenStack technology, come online it’ll be interesting to see if (and how) AWS messaging changes.

I would also look for any shift in AWS “public cloud only” stance especially given news of the CIA cloud. Many regulated companies will not put critical data or workloads on shared infrastructure. The CIA cloud is important as a test case to show that AWS can and will do secure, stand-alone clouds for customers — provided the price is right (and provided that the infrastructure mirrors exactly what AWS public cloud does).

And, if Amazon announces more incremental (sub-hour) pricing, it’ll be big news. Company execs thus far have said there is no customer demand for by-the-minute pricing that is offered by rivals including CloudSigma; ProfitBricks, Google; and Microsoft Windows Azure.

Face it, all of the IT incumbents — Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle — will be watching what’s what at AWS: Reinvent this week. If they aren’t, they should be.

]]>Netflix has made a name for itself by open-sourcing tools to fill gaps in Amazon Web Services’ cloud and make deployment easier to manage. Now it wants to show off the other goodies it has in the pipeline — and recruit open-source development whizzes in the process. The company will host an Open Source Open House at its Los Gatos, Calif. headquarters February 6, which will feature talks by Adrian Cockcroft, Netflix cloud architect, and Ruslan Meshenberg, director of cloud platform engineering.

Netflix’ Ruslan Meshenberg

Netflix open-sourced its Asgard cloud management tool in June, then followed with Chaos Monkey for testing the limits of a public cloud deployment, Eureka for load balancing capability and Edda for faster dynamic queries. Most recently, it open-sourced Janitor Monkey to automate the cleanup of unused cloud resources. In all, Netflix has put source code for sixteen Netflix-built AWS tools on Github, Cockcroft said.

“We’re putting these projects out there one by one and have gotten really good community response. What we’d like to do is get the community engaged on the Netflix platform, as a whole, on how to use these components better together,” Meshenberg said.

Netflix will also give attendees of the February 6 event a glimpse of the other tools it has on tap. “We have a whole lot more Simian Monkeys we use internally — five or ten of them,” Cockcroft said.

Netflix hope its open-source cred will attract developer talent that fits its culture. “We’re in competition with the other big companies in the Bay Area, [like] Google and Facebook, but we like very senior people for our relatively small team.”

The end game may be much bigger than that, however. If other cloud providers adopt Netflix tools, that could lead to the construction of more scalable public cloud alternatives to AWS itself.

“If the Netflix platform gets legs, people will figure out how to make it more portable…we want someone else to lead that piece and then we’ll follow,” said Cockcroft. “We see interest from the Amazon clone vendors in picking up our tooling and porting it to Eucalyptus, OpenStack, CloudStack and other public cloud infrastructure suppliers.”

Netflix runs on Amazon’s public cloud, and that dependence has been a double-edged sword. Netflix has been able to bolster AWS for its own purposes with Asgard and other tools, but it’s still also been laid low – as recently as Christmas Eve — by AWS problems. It makes sense for the company to encourage the construction of alternative, scalable clouds.